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Why We Love Bobby Jindal

RUSH: Now, a couple words here about Bobby Jindal. There's a great disconnect, ladies and gentlemen, between the Beltway pundits in the Drive-By Media -- and I, sadly, have to include the Fox News All Stars in this. We live in a world obviously where style counts for more than anything else, and that's not good. Obama's a great stylist, a great orator, who gave great speech last night. But if you listen to it, it was meaningless. It had all kinds of lies.

Those of us who studied Obama know exactly what he's going to do. He's going to grow the government as big as he can. He's going to expand the government sector. He's going to do it at the expense of the high end of the private sector. He's going to do this. He's got the votes, by the way. If his speech created a bump in his approval numbers, he's got the votes to do anything he wants. He can do cap-and-trade, and he can do health care reform in 30 days. He can do socialized medicine. He can do whatever he wants as soon as he wants depending on the bump and the bounce he gets out of this speech, and I fully expect that the Drive-Bys will run polls showing that his approval numbers are way, way up. But the market is way, way down.

Again, the people with skin in the game heard the speech last night, and they don't like it. The market is down. It's vacillating around 150, minus 150 today. It's been around 180 or 122. It started out at minus 14. Now it's at minus 151. So the people with skin in the game, the people who invest their money to try to grow the economy are not digging what they heard last night. That continues to be the case with real people who make the country work. So we have a great stylist, a great orator who makes a great symbolic speech, wows everybody with his style. Everybody is falling all over themselves last night to praise Barack Obama in new ways that they think he hasn't been praised. "Elegant," he was... I forget some of the things. But I'm sure you were frustrated listening to it. Then Bobby Jindal came on, and everybody trashed Bobby Jindal. "That was the worst response I've ever seen. Why, that was horrible! Well, this is embarrassing. Why, get him off! This is rotten. He blew his chance," and so forth. It's very mistaken to have that impression of Bobby Jindal.

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RUSH: Let me just say it right out. I love Bobby Jindal and that did not change after last night. I respect Bobby Jindal; I have great enthusiasm for Bobby Jindal, the governor of Louisiana, and nothing that happened last night changed my mind. Now, these answers to State of the Union speeches have been silly since I first became aware of them after Nixon was giving speeches in the early seventies and the Democrats had to come out. I almost got fired from a music station. I was doing a morning show in Pittsburgh, and maybe it had happened before this, but it had to be 1972, and I'm watching a response to a Nixon speech, and I'm on the air the next day, "What the hell was that? It's not in the Constitution, where is this response stuff?" And it's always been silly. I remember Jim Wright, Fort Worthless Jim, the speaker of the House from Houston, or somewhere in Texas, responding to Reagan. "We only want to help the president. We only want to work with the president." You shifty-eyed, lying, you never intended -- all you wanted to do was destroy. But I never heard the Drive-By Media talk about what a rotten, horrible, stupid speaker Jim Wright was. In fact, they built him up.

And then I remember Rosty Rostenkowski, he answered a presidential speech at one time, and John McLaughlin of the McLaughlin Group went nuts, "Do we have a new Democrat spokesman, Rosty!" So the Democrats go out there and give their responses, be it to Bush 41 or 43, and nobody dumped on them because they understand it's a lose-lose. Here you've got the big pomp and ceremony with live feedback, stand up, standing ovation, applause after applause after applause in the House chamber, and then you get some dinky little anteroom or even a governor's mansion in front of a staircase where there's no laugh track, there's no applause track, there's none of this. But I never heard, I have never heard the media, both sides, conservative, liberal media, dump on a responder in all my life until last night. They dumped on Jindal in ways that are damaging and make no sense. I hear from all of you in e-mail or on phone calls, you're sick of style, you're stick of phony baloney, plastic banana, good-time rock 'n' rollers who lie through their teeth and tell people whatever they want to hear, but they do it so well. You're sick of it because it's destroying the country. Well, we got that big time last night.

We got lie after lie after lie spoken as well as it's ever been said. We had nothing said last night, unless you knew who this guy is, and are willing to admit it, then you could walk out of that room last night scared to death for your country. But if you don't know who the guy is, you walk out of there feeling great because, man, he sounds smart, and it looked good, and, wow, everybody loved him, and, oh, it's sort of like the faith people have in God. You can't prove it, but you know it. You can't tell anybody why, but you know it. Same thing here. People who don't believe in God believe in Obama. Agnostics, atheists, because believe me, a planeload of atheists on a jet on the way to Hawaii and three of the four engines go out, the atheists start praying to who? God. Not the ocean, to save 'em. Everybody believes in God at some point, but not until they face their mortality. Everybody does. They have some God. Very few people think they're it. Obama is one. I think when Obama prays, it's to himself. Those of us who know him know this. Those of us who don't care about that, who just want symbolism, feel so good.

So, where are we? We as conservatives are in the wilderness, and many of you are hopeless. So we have a guy, Bobby Jindal, 37 years old, first time on the national stage, shows up last night to make a response to The Messiah. All he did was articulate what we believe. All he did was articulate opposition to what Obama is doing, with the obligatory when he's right, we'll work with him, just like we worked with Clinton on NAFTA, just like we worked with Clinton on welfare reform after we brought him in. These things happen. It doesn't mean that we lose our distrust. All Bobby Jindal did was tell us what conservatism is; he used his own life story to do it; he talked about the American people making the country work. He had it all. Now, he may not have done it in the same stylistic way as Obama. I can understand the Democrats trashing the man, just as they trashed Sarah Palin. They are mean-spirited, heartless, horrible winners. But the people on our side are really making a mistake if they go after Bobby Jindal on the basis of style.

Because if you think people on our side, I'm talking to you, those of you who think Jindal was horrible, in fact, I don't want to hear from you ever again if you think that what Bobby Jindal said was bad or what he said was wrong or not said well, because, folks, style is not going to take our country back. Solid conservatism articulated in a way that's inspiring and understanding is what's going to take the country back. Bobby Jindal's 37 years old. I've spoken to him numerous times. He's brilliant. He's the real deal. I'm not coming here to defend him, he doesn't need that. We're going to have to figure out what we want. Do we want to have somebody in our party who can sound as smart as Obama regardless what he says and convince people to vote for us, or do we believe in a set of principles that defined this country's founding and will return it to greatness again? And if we do, we cannot shun politicians who share those beliefs simply 'cause we don't like the way they say it.

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RUSH: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know. One more thing about Bobby Jindal here. Two years ago, if you had taken a poll among people who know Bernie Madoff, he would have had a 99% approval rating, and the guy who had blown the whistle on him would have had a 1% approval rating. Today, Bernie Madoff has a 0% approval rating and the guys who blew the whistle on him are now being asked, "Why didn't you speak up louder?" Barack Obama has whatever his approval rating is. Somebody told Bobby Jindal to act like he was talking to first graders last night. I don't know who advised him to do it. That can get fixed. But don't throw this guy overboard, and our side is doing this, and it is a huge mistake. If we're going to start throwing genuine conservatives overboard for some of these specious reasons, we deserve to get our butts beat every election.

Greetings and welcome back. Rush Limbaugh, the EIB Network. 800-282-2882. One hour from now, our Female Summit begins; instructions to callers to come in due course. Bobby Jindal and this whole business here of his speech and how it was not delivered in such a great, stylish way. How about the story he told? During Katrina, people on their rooftops, line after line after line after line of rescue boats, federal bureaucrats would not let 'em leave without proof of insurance. A local sheriff told a bureaucrat, "Sue me. Arrest me. I'm going to rescue people." Jindal heard him, said "What are you talking about, sheriff?" The sheriff told the story. Jindal gets on the phone to the bureaucrat and says, "I'm Bobby Jindal, congressman, Louisiana. You can arrest me, too," and they set out on the boats and they said to hell with FEMA, and they went and got the job done.

They didn't wait around for the bureaucracy. That story is the antithesis of where America is today, and it's the kind of story that America needs to hear and understand that made the country great.

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RUSH: Here's Bobby Jindal on the Today show this morning. Meredith Vieira says, "You just heard the vice president take you to task for some of the words that you brought up last night. He said, basically, he's heard about all the criticism, but you never say what you're going to do."

JINDAL: The Republicans have laid out a plan, for example, rather than spending a billion dollars on the Census, $300 million to buy federal government cars, instead of all the wasteful spending in the stimulus, why not do what they first said they were going to do: let's do targeted infrastructure investments, let's do tax breaks, let's lower permanently the tax, lower tax breaks on the lower tax brackets in the income tax, let's cut taxes on capital gains, let's give a more aggressive net carry forward of losses for small businesses. Here's the fundamental disagreement. We think we do need to work to get the economy moving. We think it's more important to get the private sector moving rather than just spending government money. We need to focus on getting our businesses to hire people to create jobs. That will help to address the challenges that our country is facing.

RUSH: And that's Bobby Jindal expressing conservatism in a clear and articulate way, direct contrast to that coming out of the mouth of Obama. So the guy is good, folks. Don't throw him overboard. By the way, speaking of Bobby Jindal, as you know, he said he doesn't want to take some of the stimulus money because it will wreck the law and the budget on unemployment compensation benefits in Louisiana. Guess who's joining him? The Democrat governor of Tennessee says he might reject a portion of his stimulus out of concerns it would force the state to raise taxes on business in the future, exactly what Jindal said. This caused Chuck-U Schumer to come on and say, you can't just take a la carte here, you gotta take it all or take nothing. But a Democrat governor now parroting Bobby Jindal.